He’s currently at 26% on Kalshi and Polymarket, with AOC at 15% and Newsom at 11%. But I don’t think that’s how it plays out.

Half of Americans can’t even give an opinion on Jon Ossoff. Americans know AOC and Newsom much better. Name ID is a massive predictor in who wins presidential nominations in the era we live in.

Look at Joe Biden. Look at Donald Trump. Look at Hillary in 2016 too. Everybody knew who they were long before they ever ran and that mattered more than anything. The presidency and presidential elections have evolved over the last 20 years, the result of the evolution of our media ecosystem from a simple TV and print structure to what we live in now: chaotic silos, distributed across all of our phones.

There are exceptions. Kamala Harris is known by 96% of Americans (who is the 4% that doesn’t?) and is leading national polls for 2028. There’s more variables for Kamala, for example she just ran, lost and Democrats are desperate to win. So name ID is necessary but it’s not enough.

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The other exception people will throw at me is Obama. In December 2006 almost half the country couldn’t rate him either, about where Ossoff is right now and he won. Fair. But the people who did know Obama liked him like 4 to 1. Ossoff’s not close to that, he’s barely above water with the people who know him. And again, it was a very different media environment.

Nate Silver called Ossoff his “far-away No. 1 choice” at Crooked Con on Saturday, he said Ossoff “seems like the uniformly ‘compromise candidate’ between the progressive and the more centrist factions of the party.” Maybe he has a point there but how will that play out in the wild? I gave Ossoff a home in both lanes in the model and he didn’t move much. AOC still wins 28% of runs vs. 21% for Ossoff.

Half of my model is my personal ratings and I rate Ossoff 9th. As I wrote earlier, he leads in the market. On my ratings alone, he wins 13% of runs. Blended together and he’s third.

I still think the market and conventional wisdom is sleeping on Newsom. 72% of people know who he is. His brand is out there, he’s run one of the biggest states for 8 years and he stood up to Trump in a big way last year, when Democrats didn’t know how to fight back yet.

I also think it’s strange that Kalshi gives Ossoff a 66% chance to run. It’s weird to have a frontrunner who may not even run.

So I’m putting it on the record. On Nov. 9 I made a call on the site that AOC’s market price passes Ossoff’s on any day before June 30, 2027. If it doesn’t happen you’ll see it graded wrong on the track record page. I can’t go back and change it either, the product locks it.

The next wave of YouGov data will show whether Ossoff has boosted his name ID.

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UPDATED: The 2028 Machine

He told me all of this on camera Thursday afternoon, because Fred and I just started a show together. Peanut Gallery just premiered today. Fred has also become a friend.

And yes, he’s a Trump. The family you’ve heard of. The 45th and 47th President is his uncle and Fred grew up inside the family and wrote a fantastic, hard to put down book about it in 2024.

That isn’t what he wants to talk about most though. His son William is disabled and Fred’s thoughts on politics start there. When I asked him about the CT governor’s race, he had the same worries as everyone else (taxes and energy costs), but his focus is on caregiver pay and training, technology that helps people communicate and housing.

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Many of William’s caregivers are Haitian and Fred made a point of thanking them on the show.

When Fred went on The View in 2024 and endorsed Kamala Harris, the Harris campaign tagged the clip and it got 3 million views that night. He had contacts at the highest level of that campaign. They still never brought him in or wanted to talk about disability issues.

“This is typical Democrat way,” Fred told me. “The consultants take over and they’re too smart by half.”

I tried to see the campaigns’ POV. I just don’t see it.

Fred has known Donald for more than 6 decades and he’s telling voters directly what to expect: the word “rigged” before the polls close and the need for a plan if anything goes wrong where you vote. Democrats spend a lot of money looking for people who can reach voters the party has lost and this is one who keeps volunteering.

On the show Fred made the offer again, this time to Bob Brooks, the firefighter running in PA’s 7th District, where Brooks spent 20 years as a Bethlehem firefighter. Lehigh is in Bethlehem. Fred went there, as did his dad and his son, and he knows the place and the people like the back of his hand. Fred said he’d come knock doors.

Brooks has until Tuesday to call him.

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She spoke with a former Goldman Sachs partner, a Quinnipiac professor, former GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley and State Representative Steve Meskers. But the best part belongs to First Selectman Fred Camillo.

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Linskey asked Fred how he handles opponents who tie him to Trump and he didn’t dodge it. “If you voted for him, you have to say you voted for him,” he said. He told Linskey that he voted for Trump three times.

Then he went on about what the national trend does to a local margin. He said you can win by a record margin one year and then watch it shrink the next.

And Fred would know. He’s won 4 races for first selectman and he’s the most popular Republican in town. But his margins are all over the place: about 15 points in 2019, 34 in 2021 and 19 in 2023. Last November, he beat Democrat Anthony Moor by 12.6 points, the closest race of the four. And on that night, Greenwich Democrats took control of the Board of Estimate and Taxation and Rachel Khanna won her selectman seat with 9,001 votes, just 108 behind Republican Lauren Rabin.

The registration numbers are really interesting. In October 2002, Greenwich had nearly 16K Republicans and 7K Democrats. As of October 2025, it’s 13,664 Democrats and 13,126 Republicans and 19K unaffiliated voters are the town’s biggest bloc. A 2-to-1 GOP town is now a coin flip.

Steve Meskers, who in 2018 became the first Democrat Greenwich sent to the state House since 1912 told Linskey his worry is whether the political center holds. Most of the people she interviewed said the same thing.

Count me in this camp.

Ryan Fazio, another Greenwich Republican, is on the ballot for governor on November 3. He’s also said he voted for Trump, after years of being coy. Fred told the WSJ how he thinks about that vote. Greenwich will weigh in on Fazio’s support for Trump in 2 weeks.

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But Eversource’s latest report to the SEC tells a different story. The company only has $62M on its books for this. Connecticut Light & Power’s share is $29.8 million. The other $906M it could owe, which covers October 2014 through March 2026, isn’t on its books at all. The filing states that the company doesn’t consider that larger refund probable. Even though federal regulators have ordered them to pay it.

It’s a bold bet for Eversource, a company that keeps losing. The company asked federal regulators to hold off on forcing the refund and they said no. It then asked a federal appeals court to pause the refund requirement and the court refused, records show.

In September, regulators threw out the rest of Eversource’s arguments and left the refund in place. Eversource is still fighting this in court.

And the thing is, Eversource had $1.8 billion in cash at the end of June, according to the same filing. This is an accounting call about what the company thinks it will end up owing at the end of the day. If you look at their books, it’s clear they think most of this refund won’t happen.

Meanwhile, Eversource is demanding more money for the same power lines. It and the other power line owners asked federal regulators to raise the level of profits they can take and regulators said they hadn’t demonstrated that the increase was fair.

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But they still allowed the higher rate to take effect on November 30 while they decide, on the one condition that the money gets paid back if regulators end up rejecting the increase. Eversource’s slides for Wall Street investors say so plainly. The refund for the old overcharge isn’t due until May 2027.

Officials in Connecticut have pushed back. In May, the state’s utility regulators (PURA) asked the federal government to make Eversource and other power companies report their progress on the refund. Federal regulators said no.

That same month, Governor Lamont and 5 other New England governors came out against the rate increase.

This week, Massachusetts went further. On Tuesday, Gov. Maura Healey told Eversource and the other companies to start paying people back now. She doesn’t want them to wait until next May and gave them until October 27 to say how much Massachusetts customers are owed.

Eversource told WBUR that it “plans to ultimately comply,” but said it won’t rush. Eversource hasn’t said how much of the refund belongs to Connecticut customers.

Eversource will have another investor report early next month, just weeks before the higher rate goes live. We’ll know more then about whether the company still expects to avoid paying most of it.

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On page 37 there’s a table that splits grid spending into buckets. One is called Aging Infrastructure, which is the cash used to replace old lines and substations before they fail.

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Back in 2023, Eversource put $260.7M into that bucket in Connecticut. But last year, it was just $132.5M. In Massachusetts, they got a big increase from $310M to $403.6M. If you looked at spend per customer on that bucket 2 years ago, the states were about even (about $200 each).

Now Eversource spends about $100 per customer in Connecticut and about $249 in Massachusetts. And you could argue that Connecticut needs it more, with more miles of overhead wires than Massachusetts.

Eversource said in 2024 that it would cut spending here because they were pissed at our regulators. They said these cuts would probably hit reliability. The company did what it said.

The company told WFSB this week that outages are shorter and less frequent now. But its own reliability report says outages got longer in 2024 and again in 2025. I can’t prove that the cut caused that, there’s no filing that said that. But I did ask.

I sent Eversource 7 questions on Tuesday and didn’t get a response.

But they did email me on Wednesday. But it was them sending me my bill. It’s worth reminding you that this regulated monopoly in our state is asking for $451M more a year from customers.

Somebody with more leverage than me is asking now. On Thursday the state’s Office of Consumer Counsel, essentially the customers’ lawyer, filed formal questions that Eversource is required to answer by Oct. 22.

It’s asking for the spending to be broken out and wants to know how the parent company decides which of its utilities (which states) get the money. (I sent that office these numbers on Tuesday. It was filed on Thursday.)

The public hearings on the rate case will start on Nov. 9 in New Britain. Eversource’s CEO told investors the noise would die down after the election.

I don’t think that will be the case.

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Look at the people who built him up. Tucker Carlson apologized for his support of Trump and left the Republican Party and said he’d help build a third one in July.

Then there’s the elected politicians. Reuters found that Republicans in 41 of 62 competitive congressional races put distance between them and the big man. This is normal for a bad midterm year, but we’ve never seen this with Trump and the wrath he brings against those who side against him. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, who has criticized Trump over his immigration enforcement policy, got a Trump repost calling her a “backstabber.”

Senators who aren’t on the ballot until 2028 or 2030 are speaking out. John Kennedy of Louisiana said no public official, Trump included, should spend public money on ads about himself (Kennedy may also want to run for president and has thoughts on what a 2028 GOP primary could look like).

Even Ted Cruz (another one eying 2028) called out Trump’s deal to send billions to Iran: “an exceptionally bad idea.” John Curtis of Utah bashed Don Jr.’s business dealings. These aren’t Never Trumpers.

But it’s noticeable that these Republicans don’t walk on eggshells anymore. We were living in a world, even when Trump was out of office, where elected Republicans walked on eggshells (except for a few weeks after January 6, 2021).

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Trump doesn’t suck up all the oxygen in the room anymore either. He turned 80 a few months ago. He still has energy but he looks elderly and isn’t the physically dominant presence he was even 2 years ago.

And voters notice it: 55% say his physical health isn’t good enough for the job and more than 1/3 of Republicans say he’s too old. His job approval is in the mid-30s, the lowest for any president heading into a midterm.

Over the last few weeks, he’s been campaigning in Alabama, Oklahoma and Nebraska, states he won by 20 points or more.

And look who’s emerging on the other side. James Talarico, 37, has a 68% chance on Kalshi of being elected US Senator from Texas. Abdul El-Sayed, 41, has a 71% chance at winning the senate race in Michigan. Jon Ossoff, 39, is essentially a sure thing to win re-election in Georgia. These are states Trump carried in 2024. These 3 politicians all first ran for office after Trump won in 2016.

The tectonic plates of American politics are shifting once again. It can be hard to realize it in the moment but if you take a step back, you can see the signs of something bigger than a blue wave coming.

We’ve entered the post-Trump era.

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He ended the meeting with a stock tip. “Tip of the day is Eversource, all right?” he said, according to a transcript of the session. “It’s undervalued. Get in heavy.”

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If you’re like me and live somewhere that Eversource services, you can see the bull case every month… on your electric bill. As the CEO was giving a “stock tip” to Wall Street, his company is asking state regulators for $451 million more a year. The AG’s office estimates it will raise residential electric bills by about 11%. Eversource also wants a 10.25% return on equity for its shareholders too. The decision comes in the middle of 2027.

The most interesting thing the CEO said wasn’t the stock tip.

“We just shut the faucet off in Connecticut until we get the storm cost,” Nolan told the room. “We weren’t going to put another dime down there.”

Eversource has been fighting Connecticut regulators over storm costs. The CEO said Eversource stopped spending in the state. So the company that maintains the lines over our streets, is telling investors that he’s holding back work in the state until the state pays up?

And it’s hard to reconcile with the company’s own numbers. Eversource’s quarterly SEC filing shows its electric utility in Connecticut spent $288.7M on its distribution system in the first half of 2026. That's the poles and wires the state regulates. So either the faucet was never turned completely off or Nolan was referring to projects Eversource chose not to work on.

I reached out to Eversource asking what projects were paused, I haven’t heard back.

Either way, the pressure worked. In July, Connecticut regulators approved $869M in storm costs and Nolan told the investors that the utility commission is a different animal now.

“We’re not going to get the types of surprises that we’ve gotten in the past,” he said. “This is a stable regulatory body that’s engaged.”

The evidence is looser than Nolan’s confidence. He claimed Eversource won $960M but no document tracks that and the company’s own earnings slides don’t either.

He also had his facts wrong. He said the commission has 5 new members when it only has 4. He also claimed a gas rate case jumped from $70M to $104M but PURA’s actual decision gave the company about $87 million.

It’s worth paying attention to Nolan talking about turning the faucet off with what’s coming down the pike. The next big project is smart meters, a project Nolan told investors will now cost $1B because of the delays. Eversource had put its own estimate at $855 million in 2024. You’ll be paying for this on your future bills. Nolan is adamant that the company gets its cost recovery locked in before the meters go up.

The same goes for a new substation and an extra $60M needed for tree trimming. The work that’s needed before the next big storm (that brings down trees and blocks roads) is behind the meters in the queue.

Eversource also revealed in filings that it’s weighing “potential legal courses of action” over storm repair costs that PURA denied. Nolan put it simply in the Wall Street meeting: “That’s not over yet.”

Update, Oct. 6: An earlier version of this post said $511.5M. That number was the utility’s total investment, including transmission lines that federal regulators oversee. The number for the local grid is $288.7M.

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But neither of those starts today. Under Public Act 26-15, the chatbot rules for kids start on the first day of 2027 and the job applicant notice goes live October 1, 2027, according to Faegre Drinker and Proskauer. Staggering the start dates like this is normal in government, it takes time for the government to set it up and companies need time to comply. But the announcements didn’t mention it.

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So here’s what actually went live today.

Any employer filing a mass layoff notice now has to disclose whether the job cuts are “related to the employer’s use of artificial intelligence or another technological change.” This covers companies with 100 or more employees, for the most part.

A company facing a discrimination complaint can’t blame its hiring software anymore, too. The law says using that tool is “not a defense.”

The stuff the AG enforces even has a cushion. Through the end of September 2027, the AG has to provide companies the opportunity to fix a violation before getting penalized.

The big thing I’m watching is the layoff question. It’s still unclear if the public will get to see the answers because the law says employers report to the Labor Department but doesn’t say that the department is required to publish them. I emailed the Labor Department and starting today, I’ll track down every notice that comes in.

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Voters aren’t buying anyone yet.

Ossoff has been saying repeatedly that he’s not running for president in 2028 but the markets have him at 68% to run anyway. He’s the most expensive candidate to buy on Kalshi right now with the draft-Ossoff machine doing some real work. I described this scenario in June and now it’s happening in the real world. The senator’s denials don’t move the market with most traders remembering Senator Obama in 2006 telling Tim Russert that he wasn’t going to run in 2008. (Spoiler alert: He changed his mind.)

I trust the money over the polls and the prime example of this is Kamala Harris. Her polling average is 35.4% but the market only has her at 8.9% to win the nomination. That 26.5-point gap is the biggest discrepancy of anyone in the field. This 27 point gap is the biggest discrepancy of anyone in the field and I built a poll layer in the model as a display vs. being an input. Just like in previous cycles, the polls measure name recognition and typically don’t help tell us who will get nominated.

I’ll admit, I got something wrong in the last published version of the model. I had just 4 coalitions in the party but now I think there are at least 6. You may remember the populist bucket in the first version of the model. Now every candidate has a main coalition and a secondary one. When a candidate quits or doesn’t run, their support gets funneled to the closest coalition instead of the closest ideology.

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Over the summer, the DNC made a major change to the calendar and now South Carolina will be the first to vote on January 22, 2028. Then Nevada goes, New Hampshire follows on February 8th and New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia complete the first phase.

The calendar did one thing I didn’t expect. The market says Pete Buttigieg has a 91% chance of running, more than anyone else. In my simulations he now wins 3 times every thousand scenarios. He did way better in a “retail” calendar with Iowa and New Hampshire leading off the process. Iowa was pushed out of the early window and New Hampshire is now later. That’s where Pete was going to get his oxygen. He’s the biggest loser of the DNC’s calendar decision.

Which brings me to a candidate that the model loves. It surprises me every time he wins a simulation.

Ro Khanna is priced 13th in the markets at around 1.7% but he finishes 6th in my simulation. I’ve searched for the bug but there isn’t one. 2 things are driving this result. Ro is the most theme-sensitive candidate in the field, so if the election is about AI and work, that boosts him way more than anybody else (he’s the congressman from Silicon Valley who’s at war with Big Tech). And Ro inherits a lot of the left in scenarios where AOC doesn’t run. The energy has to go somewhere and there’s more in that part of the party by far.

6 months ago, I had AI dominating the election as a hypothetical, one setting among four. But after the last few weeks, it isn’t hypothetical anymore. For example, Connecticut’s AI layoff notice requirement goes live October 1 (I’m going to be reading those filings all fall). I wouldn’t be surprised if the model is onto something and Ro surpasses expectations in 2028, especially if AOC runs for US Senate instead.

I do disagree with the current model.

I think Newsom wins the nomination in 2028. The market has him down big and my model hits him hard when scrutiny lands. I think both are wrong. The market can price attention and news cycles, but it can’t price 20 years of practice at holding a coalition together with a bunch of people who don’t like you. Newsom has governed our largest state as a relative moderate with a legislature to his left and an activist base sniping at every moment. His whole job has been working with them vs. winning arguments against them.

Newsom was asked about this in July and said he was “for addition, in the spirit of academia, not for subtraction.” Last week, he refused to put distance between him and DSA and said the socialist label was just… a label. He says these are voters he intends to keep. Most of the field is going to give DSA the heisman and spend the primary going on and on about what they’re not. Newsom won’t and the market has him at 15 cents partly because it doesn’t know how to price that. We’ll know more in November.

I also think he’s the best communicator in this field and a lot of readers will see what I mean next year.

There are a few pending items. We don’t know if AOC will run for the White House or Schumer’s seat. Ossoff is still saying he won’t run. The country still doesn’t know what the 2028 election will be about. And the calendar, the one June variable that’s settled, hurts the retail candidates and helps the church vote.

The 2028 Machine is live here.

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But that morning, Brother Matt turned on CNN and he didn’t make a joke for the rest of the day.

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Brother Matt told us that a plane struck one of the Twin Towers. The kid next to me started crying, one of his parents worked at the World Trade Center or close enough that the details didn’t matter.

We then watched the second plane hit live as it happened. The room went quiet.

The next thing I remember was walking across campus to the main building and into the office of Mr. Gandy, the head of admissions and student favorite. He told me the Pentagon was hit. Someone said, “we’re at war.”

School was let out early. Monica, my friend Ben’s mom, picked us up and drove us back to our part of the state. We stopped at Washington Rock, where George Washington watched the British troop movements in 1777.

From there you have a clear and direct view to the Manhattan skyline. We left the PT Cruiser and could see smoke pouring out of the island, drifting south. We didn’t say a word until we got back in the car.

My dad worked in the city and phones didn’t work. Did he get out? When will service come back? Are more planes coming?

I was lucky that my dad came home that night.

The fear faded, faster than we thought it would, because the United States came together in a way that brought calm to a scared kid in New Jersey.

I’m 39 now and my kids will know 9/11 like how I knew Pearl Harbor. A thing that happened to people’s parents. When they learn about 9/11 and ask me about it, I’ll tell them about Brother Matt not telling a joke that day. Not about the smoke we saw at Washington Rock or about waiting for the phone to ring.

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Connecticut Water serves around 350K people in 60 towns and they just asked the state in May for about 21% more, which is around $15.54 a month. Aquarion, which supplies my house in Greenwich, serves 250K people statewide, most of them in Fairfield County. It was sold by Eversource on June 30 to a public authority and now PURA doesn’t regulate it.

First, let’s talk Connecticut Water with their deadline coming soon. They claim their ask is 21% but their parent company is telling Wall Street a different story. And now the water companies don’t have to wait for a rate case to jack up your bill, they can just add surcharges whenever they please and regulators have let them do it 4 times over the last 2 years and it now sits at nearly 10% (which is the legal ceiling).

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The company told shareholders that it anticipates pushing roughly $238 million in PFAS cleanup costs onto ratepayers and they won’t need a rate case to do it.

The company asked for a big raise in 2024 but regulators threw out most of it, mainly because the company couldn’t illustrate that their projects were finished and serving customers.

The new request, according to the parent company’s latest quarterly report, covers projects “through the end of 2026.” A lot of this work hasn’t happened yet. The regulators who stood up for ratepayers in 2024 are gone. The state legislature seated a new five-member PURA just 5 days before the filing. The company’s president, Craig Patla, told the Hartford Business Journal that they expect a fairer hearing with this new board.

Onto Aquarion: when they were owned by Eversource, they asked for a 42% rate increase. When the sale went through, the new owner withdrew the ask. PURA’s approval order also freezes rates for 180 days, so nothing will change until the end of the year.

The new owners of Aquarion believe they’ll need increases of 6.5% to 8.35% a year, for every year over the next decade. With that rate, your bill will double over a decade. They portray this as a smaller, more acceptable increase instead of the big fights that the utilities pick every few years. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

And like I wrote, PURA no longer has a say in this. The state’s water regulation page makes it clear that it now doesn’t regulate Aquarion, at all.

The rate decisions are now made by the new Aquarion Water Authority’s own board. I’ll be reporting on who sits on the board and how ratepayers can provide feedback.

Here’s what you can do. Email PURA.ExecutiveSecretary@ct.gov (with docket number 26-03-15) by September 15. The decision will be made in the new year, February most likely. Aquarion customers have nowhere to write yet but I’ll share it when I find out. I’ve asked Connecticut Water for a list of projects behind their request and I’ll publish what they send.

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It's actually even worse. Anthem wants a 17.4% increase for 2027 and UnitedHealthcare wants 18.9%. And UnitedHealthcare only sells "off the exchange," so if you shop on Access Health CT, Anthem is your only option.

This is what happens every summer. Insurers tell the state how much more they want to charge next year, and the Insurance Department decides how much of it they get. This year’s requests average around 16 to 18% and hit 220K people stuck in this market: small business employees, freelancers and people who retired before Medicare kicked in.

The big problem I see is that the state regulates the insurers who pay hospital bills but doesn’t address how much hospitals charge them. Even Insurance Commissioner Josh Hershman’s release listed hospitals and providers as responsible parties for the increases.

Comptroller Sean Scanlon runs the Connecticut Partnership Plan, the self-insured pool that covers nearly 75K municipal and school employees. He’s got a front row seat to this whole thing and I spoke with him last week.

I asked him: if provider prices are driving up premiums, isn’t the state’s process focused on the wrong part of the problem?

“Yeah, it is absolutely right.” In a market with such little competition, “the providers can charge whatever they want. The insurers have the ability to basically charge the customers whatever they want correspondingly.”

Commercial healthcare spending per person grew 25% from 2019 through 2023, while Medicare grew just 7% over the same period (it sets prices administratively). Connecticut’s hospital spending analysis found inpatient prices 27% more than the national median in Hartford… it’s 40% above it in Bridgeport and New Haven.

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Scanlon’s plan provides a real life test of how powerful public purchasing can be. The results, so far, are mixed. Towns and school boards in the state keep joining with 187 groups now vs. 153 just 2 years ago. Guilford, Scanlon’s hometown where his wife, Meghan Scanlon, is on the board of finance, just saw a 35% increase this year.

The state plan also lost money last year. Its FY25 report shows $731.4M in claims against $706.8M in premiums, a $24.6M gap. Scanlon blames rising medical costs, the same explanation the insurance companies give in their rate filings.

One other thing to note: the state plan uses Anthem’s network and Anthem negotiates the hospital contracts. What members of the plan paid hospitals compared to those on an Anthem commercial plan isn’t public. “Every health plan in America, like I said, is dealing with this,” Scanlon told me.

A program called FlyteHealth shows what can be done when you can’t control the underlying price of a drug. In July, the Comptroller’s office announced that the GLP-1 and weight management program had saved an estimated $29.7M in drug costs. An analysis says the program cost $32 net per participant each month in year 1 (a return of 77 cents on the dollar). The $29.7M is an estimate of what they avoided spending, based on what the state would have paid if patients had been prescribed Wegovy, which costs over $1K a month, instead of Ozempic which costs around $350, even though they’re essentially the same drug.

The cheaper option was available because Flyte providers were allowed to prescribe diabetes-labeled drugs even if they didn’t have a diabetes diagnosis. The state's actuary didn’t include these savings in its ROI calculation. For Scanlon, the point is bigger than the short term drug cost savings. This program pairs the medication with mandatory lifestyle management and he argues that “money we spend now to help these people is money we save in triplicate” later.

The state legislature spent last session rearranging the furniture around the big question: pricing. Scanlon helped broker a deal that gives hospitals more government cash in exchange for holding them accountable “for the first time ever with real teeth on the benchmark.”

Under the law, a hospital that goes over cost benchmarks might be forced to file an improvement plan that it can write itself. A monetary penalty, a one-time community project of $100K to $400K, applies only to hospitals that refuse the paperwork, beginning in 2029.

The law also made the benchmark much easier to hit. For 2028 through 2032, it rises to 3.9%, a full point above this year’s target and hospitals also can’t be flagged “based solely on commercial payment growth.” And surprisingly, the agency that ran the program was abolished.

The one benchmark penalty with real teeth behind it passed a year earlier and it points at the insurers. Starting in 2027, if a carrier’s rate increases have exceeded the benchmark 2 years in a row, the insurance commissioner can cut its next request by up to 2 points.

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So a company like Anthem, which pays hospital bills then passes them along, can lose money for exceeding the benchmark. A hospital system that sets the prices that Anthem and other carriers pay can exceed that same benchmark, write its own improvement plan, on a timeline that the legislature just made more favorable to them, with a penalty that only hurts if they skip filling out paperwork, starting in 2029.

One fix on the table is Governor Lamont's Connecticut option. Scanlon is one of the people building it. He described it to me as small businesses and nonprofits buying "into the plan that I run," the version he's pushed since 2019 as a state rep. The proposal the governor unveiled in March is different: designed by the state but run by private insurance co’s who carry the risk. Scanlon calls it a "cousin" of the Colorado option. Colorado’s own analysis of the program found lower premiums and about 15% less out of pocket costs, although insurers there repeatedly missed the plan’s price targets.

Towards the end of the call, I asked what I see as the central question: Nobody seems to have the authority to do anything about the real problem, hospital prices. Scanlon answered with Maryland, the one state that sets hospital prices directly.

“Maryland, for example, does essentially price controls. So that’s sort of one end of it from one side. And then doing nothing is the other. I’d say a cost growth benchmark is sort of a middling path. I think it’s worth having conversations about whether we should move closer to the Maryland model if this doesn’t work.”

Nobody in Connecticut thinks the comptroller’s office is Sean Scanlon’s last public job. When a top elected official with that kind of future says price controls could belong in the conversation, I start to listen. The stakes are getting bigger.

The good thing is that none of this is a done deal. You can write the Insurance Department at cid.ratefilings@ct.gov until August 24. The public hearing is on August 26th in Hartford. The state will then decide in September.

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At the state convention in July of 1978, delegates endorsed Grasso for a 2nd term but gave Killian enough votes to force a primary, and he was then replaced on the ticket by William O’Neill. Richard Madden of the New York Times reported from the convention floor that balloting for lieutenant governor opened with 9 candidates and then whittled down to a few contenders who withdrew backstage. There was a five-way fight for secretary of state that went on for hours and ended with Barbara Kennelly winning a close race.

Kennelly was the daughter of John Bailey, who ran the Connecticut Democratic Party for 30 years, with a stint as national DNC chairman under JFK and LBJ. He would run conventions from a small office offstage that everyone called the “green room.” But by 1978, Bailey had been dead for 3 years. O’Neill, Grasso’s new running mate, occupied the green room that night and by the New York Times’ reporter’s account, no one had control over the convention. The days of John Bailey were over.

Grasso won the September 12 primary 137,904 to 66,924, per CQ Press’s Guide to U.S. Elections. The state didn’t publish official vote statements for primaries back then, which is why the data sits inside a reference guide you’d find at Barnes and Noble and not an official state document. Many claim the primary was wire thin, but they’re confusing it with a 1974 contest between the same two candidates. In November, Grasso beat Republican Ronald Sarasin 613,109 to 422,316, a margin of 190,793.

Killian ran at Grasso from the middle and the establishment center. A sitting governor being dragged into a primary again, but this year, where the challenge is coming from reversed. The margin on Tuesday is what’s worth watching.

I am a member of the Greenwich Democratic Town Committee. I worked on Ned Lamont’s 2010 campaign.

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What led to this, per the release, was Camillo “recently discovered that Connecticut Natural Gas does not have the infrastructure to meet the demands of new and expanded housing in Greenwich,” with “similar issues” coming up in talks with Aquarion, the water company.

To freeze zoning mandates across the state is a big ask, and before the presser I asked his office to show the proof. Would they release the correspondence from CNG and Aquarion or at least identify the communications the release referenced? Ken Borsuk, executive assistant to the First Selectman, answered in just two sentences. “There are no documents. The meetings were held in person.”

So the First Selectman has no paperwork from the conversations that set all this in motion. What he has is his own telling, from his most recent newsletter: “Recently I was very surprised to hear from some neighbors of mine who were doing modest tear downs and expansion of their homes in Greenwich. They had been told by Connecticut Natural Gas that they did not have the capacity to provide service for these larger homes. I spoke to CNG and they confirmed this is an issue throughout the State and we were the first to bring attention to it.”

This is a real problem and CNG confirms one version of it below. But there’s no state mandate forcing a neighbor to tear down a house and build a bigger one. The release never names the mandates Camillo wants frozen.

State Senator Ryan Fazio, who’s running for governor, spoke at Friday’s press conference and went there, naming: “8-30g, House Bill 8002, and so much more.” These are the affordable housing statute that has been on the books since 1989 and the housing law signed last November, which requires towns to write housing growth plans and limits parking minimums, while the density programs near transit are opt-in, with state money attached. None of that produces a teardown on a single family lot.

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The thing is, Camillo does have a better argument available and pieces of it are in his Sentinel op-ed. For example, the gas system is already strained by normal local growth, the laws encouraging more building would put more demand on the same pipes, so let’s pause the laws until the infrastructure catches up. It’s a legitimate argument and it deserves a straight answer. Two things in the record answer it.

The heaviest density programs in HB 8002 (the state housing law) are voluntary and Greenwich could just not join them. And no information anyone has produced connects a state requirement to the capacity problem or shows the problem exists anywhere but Greenwich. (Since 1989, 8-30g does override local zoning for qualifying affordable projects but the rollout didn’t argue the merits of 8-30g. It argued the mandates have overwhelmed the infrastructure and this is the claim I’m checking.)

Camillo’s moratorium proposal itself is kinda blank: there’s no bill text and nothing on how long the pause would run or what would end it. The wording wanders too, a moratorium on “zoning mandates” in the release becomes a “housing moratorium” in his latest newsletter.

I put questions to CNG’s parent company ahead of the presser. Has CNG told the town or any developer that it can’t serve new housing in Greenwich? Is there any limit on new connections in its Greenwich territory? Does it connect any constraints to housing growth or to something else? An Avangrid spokesman replied with a statement. Here it is, in full:

“CNG has identified that some large new service requests in Greenwich could affect the long-term reliability of service for existing customers if additional infrastructure investments are not made. Maintaining system reliability for customers remains our highest priority. The Greenwich gas distribution system has evolved over decades and CNG has continually invested in the system, however, recent growth has occurred at a fast pace. Utilities throughout the Northeast are facing similar challenges driven by aging infrastructure, changing customer demand patterns, and evolving energy needs.

“Addressing these challenges requires thoughtful planning and continued investment in critical utility infrastructure. In collaboration with Greenwich, CNG has already begun planning system reinforcement projects and identifying the most effective infrastructure solutions to address both near-term reliability needs and the town’s longer-term growth objectives.”

This reply confirms something real: some large service asks could affect reliability if the new investment doesn’t happen and the local system is getting old and has grown rapidly. I’ll give Camillo that.

But he doesn’t get the rest. I asked directly whether the company blames housing growth or other factors and CNG pointed at aging pipes and infrastructure plus evolving demand across all of the Northeast. The utility never mentioned zoning, mandates, Hartford or any statute. The fix is investment, planned with the town, and it says that planning has already started.

Camillo says a pause would give everyone time for exactly this work. It’s worth noting that planning isn’t construction and CNG gave no timeline. Nothing in the company’s account requires a change to state law.

The speakers at the presser included Fazio, State Rep Tom O’Dea of New Canaan, and State Rep Tracy Marra of Darien and Norwalk, who’s the ranking member on the Energy and Technology Committee. Fazio had his own story of what started this: “some private entities trying to expand access to housing, and they’re just not capable of doing it because of the lack of infrastructure, especially around gas.”

So now there are two origin stories, Fazio’s private entities and the newsletter’s neighbors, and neither names a project. The event drifted from there. Marra went into solar and grid reliability, while O’Dea called for more nuclear, more natural gas and went after the public benefits charge. These are real debates, but they’re regarding Connecticut energy policy more generally. None of them answers whether CNG can actually service new construction in Greenwich.

When Con Edison hit an actual gas capacity limit in Westchester County in 2019, it declared a formal moratorium on new hookups, in public filings, and stalled thousands of housing units. CNG has announced nothing like that. Its statement describes reinforcement planning but not service restrictions.

Camillo’s demand asks the legislature to freeze zoning mandates in 168 towns that he doesn’t represent. It’s also based on a problem documented only in Greenwich and only in part. The most useful result of this is the September forum Camillo says he’s planning with CNG, Aquarion and Eversource at Town Hall in Greenwich, which would put utility execs on the record in public.

Until then, the demand sits with the Governor and the state legislature.

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Kalshi’s systems picked up on the pattern, froze more than $90K in his account and referred him to the CFTC. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan declined to bring a criminal case and Perez is reportedly negotiating a settlement where he’ll likely have to give the money back.

Back in April, the CFTC charged Gannon Van Dyke, an Army Special Forces soldier, who helped plan the capture of Nicolás Maduro in January. He bought more than 436K “yes” shares of Polymarket’s “Maduro Out by January 31, 2026?” contract in the days ahead of the raid. He made over $404K and faces a federal indictment too.

Both of these cases include relatively normal people (with extraordinary access). The winnings were relatively small, especially to other lucrative trades on these markets. They bet under identities that the trading platforms could see and then the platforms turned them in.

So who hasn’t been caught? Three anonymous Polymarket accounts made more than $600K buying US-Iran ceasefire contracts back in late March and early April, when the odds of a truce were below 35%. There was one account that kept buying, right up until hours before Trump announced the ceasefire on social media. White House lawyers reviewed the trades, according to the WSJ, and determined that it’d be nearly impossible to figure out whether Trump officials were behind them because Polymarket allows anonymous accounts.

But the people who knew the ceasefire was coming were a tight, small and identifiable group. It doesn’t surprise me that this administration has shown no appetite for looking deeper into the question.

Donald Trump Jr. became a paid strategic adviser to Kalshi in January 2025, reportedly receiving about $300K in equity. 7 months later he also joined the advisory board of Polymarket, Kalshi’s chief and essentially only rival, as his investment firm put tens of millions into the company. This came weeks after the DOJ and CFTC dropped their Polymarket investigations, and 8 days before the CFTC gave Polymarket a green light to return to the US market.

Imagine if Hunter Biden did that.

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Everyone in DC knows this is happening. Earlier this year, the White House sent a staff memo warning that betting on nonpublic information is a criminal offense. In April, the Senate unanimously banned its own members and staff from prediction market trading. But the laws currently on the books can only reach an insider who bets under his or her own name, which is how Van Dyke ended up indicted. A cabinet official, top advisor, envoy, family member or a donor can trade through cut outs, park the money in crypto or overseas and leave investigators with few obvious leads.

In 1933, the Senate handed Ferdinand Pecora subpoena power and he put Jack Morgan and Charles Mitchell (Depression-era Wall Street barons) under oath. He exposed the shady practices, fraud and the tax dodges and put it all into the public record. The result was the Securities Act, the Exchange Act and ultimately the SEC.

The next administration should create a Pecora-style commission on prediction markets with actual teeth: subpoena power and blockchain forensics to unwind the anonymous wallets behind these trades. There’s gotta be criminal referrals wherever crimes were committed, no matter whose name comes up.

There’s no public evidence connecting any specific Trump official to the ceasefire trades. But at the baseline, the scandal is that nobody with subpoena power has looked into it and wanted a real accounting of who controlled these wallets, who funded them and where the money went.

France just ordered its internet providers to block Polymarket and Brazil blocked prediction market platforms in April, but they’re growing like wildfire in the US. Any Democrat running for president in 2028 should promise a commission on this now, on the record.

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Then Klosterman, in the same part of the conversation, revealed the reason. The commissioners and powers that be work for the owners. Simmons then described the arc of every commissioner we’ve seen. They arrive caring about the sport and leave like Michael Corleone at the end of Godfather II. It’s not personal, it’s business.

So, I’ve accepted the appointment. Thank you, President Trump. No statute or confirmation hearing will be necessary. And I won’t turn out like Michael Corleone (and there won’t be a Godfather III in this saga). I will start my tenure by announcing five orders:

Order 1. Youth sports are 100% free.

To solve this problem over time, we gotta start at the bottom. A sports czar who starts with the pros has no hope.

In 1988, Spain was 4 years away from hosting the Olympics and their chances to medal were pretty weak. The Spanish government set up a nonprofit and asked its top corporations to each adopt a sport. Coca-Cola took track and field. Seat took cycling, Bimbo took tennis. Renfe, their national rail company, took canoeing. In the end, Spain won 22 medals in Barcelona, their best result ever. They’ve used this strategy with some of their soccer academies since.

What will I do? I’ll convince Congress to charter the American Sports Foundation. There will be 10 year terms and I’ll assign our top companies to sports.

Amazon gets football. They already own Thursday night and now they’ll finance Pop Warners all over the country from Hawaii to Maine.

Meta gets flag football. It’s growing at an exponential clip with boys and girls and will be at the LA Olympics in 2028. I’m making a big bet on this sport.

Apple gets soccer. They own MLS rights and now they’re supporting our 8-year-old soccer players too. Apple got us the iPhone, now help us find and nurture the American Messi.

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Eli Lilly can take wrestling, a sport organized entirely by how much the athletes weigh. Exxon gets swimming, they must keep their eyes on the water.

Jensen and Nvidia get basketball. Alphabet takes volleyball, JPMorgan gets baseball and Microsoft gets softball. I can send you the full list if you’re curious.

Spain paid their corporate sponsors with airtime on the state broadcaster. We don’t have a state-owned broadcaster here but we have something even better.

Back in 1961, Congress gave the leagues an antitrust exemption. Without it, all 30 NBA teams would sell their games separately and compete with each other for the money. Today, the NBA sells one package and splits the check, the NFL is the same.

But here’s the part nobody mentions. The exemption only covers free, broadcast TV and it doesn’t cover cable and streaming. The NBA sold its rights last year to ESPN, Amazon and NBC/Peacock and a decent chunk of that package is behind a paywall. Congress is finally starting to ask about this, but Congress has never charged the leagues anything for the exemption and the leagues have spent 40 years applying it to cable and streaming, which didn’t exist in 1961.

My plan: charge them 1% of every US rights deal before an owner touches it.

Order 2. You can’t own a team and have a financial interest in a sportsbook.

The guy who the WNBA just sold the Connecticut Sun to also owns the Houston Rockets. His name is Tilman Fertitta and he also owned Golden Nugget Online Gaming, which he sold to DraftKings for $1.5B. And now, he’s one of DraftKings’ largest individual shareholders. DraftKings has an exclusive sportsbook agreement with the Houston Rockets. As an old friend of mine used to say, “dirty pool.”

He owns 8 casinos, a piece of the Wynn Resorts and he’s the US ambassador to Italy. This spring he bid $300M for Connecticut’s team. A group from Boston bid $325M and the Mohegan Tribe, which had owned the Sun since 2003, wanted to take the deal. The WNBA blocked it and said relocation is the board’s decision, not the team’s. A group from Hartford came in around the same number but the board approved Fertitta unanimously anyway… at the lowest price on the table. We don’t know why.

As your sports czar, I’m changing this now. Why did those bids lose? Buyer, price, market and reason must be published.

Order 3. Match it.

Any league that takes sportsbook money must fund gambling treatment at the same dollar amount. I’m not settling for a foundation or awareness campaign. I want the same exact number.

Recently a FanDuel customer named Terry Thompson wagered $18.5M over several years, took out a second mortgage, then a third and eventually lost his house. He had a FanDuel VIP host who sent him a reward. The reward was a cameo video from Bryce Harper that wished Thompson a happy Thanksgiving and even said hello to his son. (Harper went on the record and said he had no idea what the video was for and that FanDuel never told him. This somehow makes it worse.)

As your sports czar, I’m abolishing the job of VIP host, as of today.

Order 4. I’m dissolving the NCAA.

I’m not reforming here, no small measures. The athletes ARE employees. The word student-athlete is removed from the dictionary. It was a word that an NCAA lawyer invented to circumvent workers comp claims.

Conferences must make sense geographically. We can’t have the UCLA volleyball team travelling across the country every three weeks. That’s insane. I’m drawing the map myself. Maybe with a sharpie.

Order 5. Assorted gripes that I’m addressing.

Ticket pricing: the fees will now be in the same font size as the ticket price. No more BS. TV blackouts are now abolished and that only took 5 seconds.

Public order numbering for season ticket waitlists. It costs nothing.

Refs and game officials must explain their bad calls within a day, in their own words, without someone from comms/PR team in the room.

Concessions are now capped in any stadium or arena the public paid for. 10 fewer NBA games, starting in the fall. And MLS gets relegation. Make it work.

And then I would resign.

One interesting thing I realized when I wrote this: I didn’t invent a single power. They already exist. Congress handed the leagues the antitrust exemption back when JFK was president for free. It could put a price on that at any time it pleases.

MLB’s exemption came from an old Supreme Court decision that’s been challenged, but never successfully. In 1972 the Court said it was an aberration and ruled for the owners anyway, then told Congress to fix it if it cared. Congress has had 54 years and hasn’t done anything. The stadium bond loophole gets brought up every few years but somehow survives every time. Any state regulator could write a rule banning VIP hosts tomorrow morning. Every city that has a team has legitimate leverage over that team. More than they think.

So we actually don’t even need a sports czar. We need somebody who’s willing to use the power that’s already there.

Here in Connecticut, we just lost a major sports franchise to a man who sits on the board of a sportsbook. Our weak response was a pension fund idea that died instantly and our senator asking the Trump DOJ if they’ll take a look.

The Houston Comets will return to Texas next season and it’ll be a homecoming.

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His argument for why he should be governor (and I mean this as a compliment) is that you have the right to see every charge and those in power who would rather you didn’t see it have something to answer for.

That brings me to a detail Hearst’s Ken Dixon reported last week. The annual ethics filings came out for the three candidates running for governor of Connecticut. Ned Lamont filed 113 pages and waived the confidentiality protections available. Josh Elliott filed 25 pages and also waived his confidentiality protections.

Ryan Fazio filed six pages and did not waive the confidentiality that state law applies by default. His campaign is all about itemization and he’s the only candidate who kept a section of his form sealed.

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I spent some time looking into Chapter 10 of the state statutes trying to find out what that covers and the answer is narrow. Only two things on a Statement of Financial Interests are shielded: names of dependent children and names of creditors owed more than $10K. Lamont and Elliott each certified that they owe no debts over $10K, so their waivers opened empty envelopes. Fazio didn't check that box, which appears to mean he has a creditor list, and he’s the only one of the three who kept it sealed. The boring answer is that it's probably a mortgage, and it's probably right.

But the public benefits charge was also legal, also discoverable if you felt like excavating PURA filings in your free time. Fazio’s entire argument was that it wasn’t good enough, that the burden belongs on the official to show the line. I asked his campaign why he didn’t waive and they didn’t respond.

And there’s the question of what Fazio does for a living. Dixon and other media call him a financial advisor. Financial advisors who work with the public are registered with FINRA or the SEC and easy to find. When I ran his name through BrokerCheck and the SEC adviser database, nothing came up.

His LinkedIn doesn't answer it either. Where the employer field would normally hold a company's name, his says "Growth Equity Firm." The job before that is listed the same way: "Trading Houses."

His own filing names his employer as Services Capital. I found no record of it in any Connecticut registry or in any SEC or FINRA database. But the campaign finance records tell a different story. From 2018 to 2021 he listed COFCO International, a global commodities firm, matching the trading career from his public bio. From late 2021 through last year he listed MARCorp Financial LLC around a dozen times. Services Capital shows up just once, in an occupation field of a 2022 donation listing MARCorp as his employer.

Both firms are real and both are registered at the same suburban Chicago address. Illinois lists just one manager for MARCorp: Michael Fazio. The registered agent for both companies is Christian Fazio. Ryan Fazio’s father is named Michael. So is one of his brothers. Christian is another brother. Whichever Michael runs it, the employer Ryan Fazio has never publicly named appears to be a family firm.

Nothing is wrong with that, none of that is improper and no law made him reveal more than he did. But it took a little bit of digging to find out what a candidate for governor does for work. I asked his campaign about it. No response.

Until 1998, state officials had to disclose clients who paid them over $10K, the one question that will actually tell you if a politician has a conflict of interest. The legislature quietly got rid of it in 1997 and it never came back. Had that survived, this post would’ve been answered in Fazio’s filing.

Fazio has spent five years telling Connecticut voters that you need to start asking questions when a politician says “it’s legal” or “you could’ve looked it up.” And I completely agree with him.

I want to be clear: I don’t think there’s some huge scandal here. The sealed part is probably just his mortgage and the unnamed employer is probably a family firm. But it shouldn’t take two states and multiple databases to answer one of the most basic questions you could ask a candidate for governor.

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They’re not really separate advantages, though. They describe the same, single advantage.

I’ve spent my career watching the attention economy emerge from the inside, building strategy around where an audience actually comes from. And I’ve watched this ground shift twice. Facebook gradually cut off traffic to publishers and websites after 2016. Then a lot of newsrooms laid people off chasing video numbers that Facebook later admitted were inflated.

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Now Google is pulling back search referrals, with its new AI results answering your questions directly instead of sending people to the sites that invested in the work.

The thing with the Times is that a large number of people come to it directly, without a newsfeed or search result in between. They type the address into the browser or go to their bookmarks, they open the app out of habit, they go straight to Wordle when they wake up. The free games, the bundle and video are all real, but none of them is rare, and some of it is overstated. Plenty of companies give away a free layer or sell a bundle, but almost none have a direct relationship with millions of people who show up without being sent.

This direct relationship is exactly what the AI companies are designed to capture. And that’s where this turns into a story about power.

OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and Perplexity built systems that sit between a reader and the newsroom, so the reader gets what they came for and never has to make the trip. Perplexity and others answer the question without a click. You’ve seen how Google does the same now. Media companies still pay for the reporting, but the AI model racks up the impressions.

All of this happened without any kind of public process. There wasn’t a hearing or industry input. These companies looted the archives of the entire press (and others) and let everyone find out after the fact. The only place left to fight back is the courtroom, and only publishers with real money could afford to act.

Levien and the Times have spent $20M and 2.5 years in court over the scraping. These AI companies didn’t take all that work just to scrape it. They’re building something that answers your question for you, so you never have to go to the Times. The AI product will be the place people go, and they want people to trust them the way they trust the Times. But without putting in the 175 years.

Look, the Times will probably be fine and continue to thrive. It has the direct relationship, the 175 years, the lawyers. It’s the “paper of record.” That’s not the part to worry about. We have to look out for the middle players, the niche and local sites and the beat reporters who actually break the news. They get scraped the same way, and they can’t afford to sue the AI companies.

Once they’re gone, AI will still be answering people’s questions. But where will it get the information to answer them?

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On May 20, Eversource told state regulators that it wants around $503M more a year from electric customers in Connecticut. 11% on an average bill and 13% on a typical household. The full application will come in a few weeks and PURA then has nearly a year to make a decision.

I wrote last week about the other number, the nearly $15M Eversource reported for its CEO pay in the latest proxy. This, as it asks customers to pay more. The company is short on trust when it needs it the most.

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Your bill is really two bills stapled together. Supply (the electricity itself) is priced by the market. Delivery is what we pay to move it from point A to point B. It includes distribution, transmission, public benefits and more. This case hits just one of these: distribution, which is the poles, wires and crews that Eversource owns and operates.

Here’s what it looks like on a real bill. My bill ran north of $500 for multiple months last winter. Put 13% more on that and it runs me around $65 more a month. Yours will be different. Take 13% of your annual total and you get a rough estimate. A percentage hits a big bill harder than a small one and Connecticut bills run high in the winter.

Eversource’s best argument should be mentioned too. It hasn’t had a full rate review since 2018. It says it’s invested over $3.3B into the grid since then and hasn’t recovered around $600M of it. The costs are real, too: labor, equipment, storms, grid work.

But how much of it belongs on our bills, and whether the company has earned the benefit of the doubt, are different questions.

In 2024, Eversource said it would cut around $500M in Connecticut investment because it disagreed with the regulator’s (PURA) rulings. And now it wants customers to fund grid investment.

A company that threatened to pull back spending after losing fights with regulators shouldn’t be shocked when people have questions after the $503M ask. It’s what you’d ask of anyone who wanted that much money from you.

Here’s the thing press releases miss. This is Eversource’s first rate case in 8 years and it lands in front of a board that looks nothing like the one Eversource fought for years. Marissa Gillett chaired PURA starting in 2019 and built a record of cutting rate hikes. Eversource and Avangrid sued her, and she resigned last October.

Since the new regulators took over, PURA has already approved a $65.9M increase for United Illuminating, the state’s other utility, over the objections of the Attorney General and Consumer Counsel. AG Tong says Eversource waited until it "ran their chief regulator out of town" before asking.

Nobody knows how PURA handles a $503M case, but the early returns favor the companies.

I’ll watch this one closely and come back with what actually matters: what Eversource is really asking for, what PURA makes of it and who pays if Eversource gets what it wants.

The full application is due mid-July. Until then, $503M is just the opening salvo.

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The number in the request is $503M a year. This is the additional money that the Connecticut Light and Power Company, which is what Eversource calls itself when it sells you power here, says it needs for its distribution system. The company estimates that this would raise total bills by about 11% across all customers and 13% for a typical residential customer. The distribution line itself, the part this is really about, would climb roughly 35%. These new rates are proposed for next year.

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This is the first number. There’s also a second number in a different filing.

The proxy statement Eversource filed with the SEC this spring lists CEO Joseph Nolan’s 2025 comp at $14.9M. It also shows a lower adjusted figure of $13.5M, a number you’ll see in some coverage, but Eversource uses the larger total to actually calculate its pay ratio. It’s 104x the median worker’s pay. In 2025, the parent company reported $1.69B in net income.

This information isn’t coming from a critic, it’s from Eversource’s own words.

The CEO’s comp isn’t part of the rate request, and that’s a fair point. The company says that no salary or bonus from its CEO, CFO or president is included in the $503M ask. Even if the CEO worked for free, the shortfall would still be there. It’s a fight over how much it costs to maintain poles, wires, substations, etc.

So the CEO salary doesn’t explain the rate increase. This is 100% true.

But it still matters. Residents who watch this company pay its CEO $15M aren’t going to take a 13% increase lightly. They want the math and Eversource needs to show it.

This is the honest view of the argument. The $15M isn’t causing your bill to go up. It’s the reason Eversource is short on trust at the exact moment it’s asking for a lot of it.

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Now the request goes to PURA (the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority), a board recently rebuilt over the last year. Governor Lamont nominated a bunch of new members and named Thomas Wiehl as the new chair. The law gives them the power to make the call about the increase.

PURA won’t be ruling on whether the $15M salary is excessive. It’ll be deciding how much of the $503M request is justified: which investments matter, what the company is allowed to earn and what we actually pay.

A lot of the coverage misses that nothing will happen fast. Eversource will file its full application around July 14. State law then gives PURA up to 350 days after the effective filing date to make a decision.

Some quick napkin math and it seems like a resolution by next summer, with new rates proposed for July 1, 2027. This won’t be settled this year.

As we wait, the state is pulling levers that move faster than a rate case. Connecticut’s agencies filed a complaint at FERC on June 11 to stop extra revenue Eversource and United Illuminating collect on their lines. It was a bonus on top of the profit they’re already guaranteed.

And on May 1, the public benefits charge flipped from a cost to a credit, which will hold through at least September.

These levers will lower your bill before PURA ever rules on the rate hike. But they don’t affect the $503 million ask.

That fight belongs solely to PURA and it runs into next summer. They’ll decide how much of Eversource’s request is justified and how much of it hits your bill.

The $15M comp won’t appear anywhere in that ruling. It sits in the back of the room while the decision gets made. A company that pays one man that much, in the same year it asks for $503 million more, doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. A lot of people will be watching the math.

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